I'm looking for a internet/media device to replace an iPhone 3G and I've been pointed toward the N900 as a possibility.

I have a Nokia E72 so for calls, and texts I'm covered.
I want something predominantly for browsing, music and IM.

How good is the N900 and how is it covered for things like Facebook, Instant Messaging Clients and Music playback?

Hi chrism_scotland, welcome to Maemo.org.

The N900 is excellent in internet browsing and music playback, you won't miss your iPhone 3G at all, trust me.

The default browser, microB, is awesome and it has full flash support. N900's multitasking manages many pages in background well, and you can browse the web very comfortably, loading many pages at the same time.

The Media Player is good, music playback quality is excellent. Someone doesn't like how it manages albums and playlists (e.g it doesn't follow folders structures, only internal tags, but I think it's a good feature not an issue).

What about IM? Actually there are some services supports, and more are coming. I like how the phone manages IMs' conversations.

For facebook and IM, n900 is probably the best there is. It integrates both into its conversations mode. The music player works fine, but the playlist creation is... fiddly.

N900 is weak if you want extremely rich phone features like voice dialling or even individualised ringtones. It's a bit thin on business items - some of the obscure MfE stuff, email and the calendar are feature-poor.

N900 is great for being online, for browsing with a proper (not mobile) browser. It has a superb screen for viewing video, and TV out if you want to watch your stuff on a full sized screen. It also happily draws internet radio. It will send its sound output to your car-radio via an fm transmitter, too. And the camera will blow holes in what your iphone could do, as Nokia use Cark Zeiss lenses and good software.

Mooch around here a little - you will find plenty of threads about its weak spots! And plenty of people who are utterly happy with the device.

And welcome.

Well my main IM services I use are MSN, Facebook Chat, Yahoo and Google talk, are these supported on the N900?

Yep, they are, though as yet the front facing camera doesn't work for those services, I don't think.

All of those are supported by the N900. MSN support have to be installed though. Or you could use a separate application for it, such as Pidgin.

Sure. On one application, you can set up all these accounts (yes, the application supports msn, facebook chat, yahoo and Gtalk). When you log on, it logs all the services. By the way, the application is called Pidgin. I use it and it's great!!!

browsing and im is a lot better than the iphone.

YES, yes, yes and YES!

All these are integrated seamlessly with the text messages and the conversations app.

I used pidgin at first before we could integrate msn and others in to converations, but now I have everything integrated and I love how easy they are to use. You can link all account to your friends, as all the contacts from different services are collected in to your contactbook, and as the contacts has a merging tool, it's very easy to merge contacts(as to not have doubles if you have a same friend on msn, facebook and gtalk for example.

I use pidgin for IRC though, which works very well.